What is ‘right-clicker mentality’? | Hacker News Reader

What is ‘right-clicker mentality’?

vice.com

55 pointsnickcotter70 comments

> “This is a great example of right-clicker mentality,” Midwit Milhouse said on Twitter. “Sure, you can make your own gold-coated steak for 65GBP, but then you don’t have the satisfaction, flex, clout that comes from having eaten at Salt Bae’s restaurant. The value is not in the cost of the steak. Go ahead, make yourself a gold-coated steak at home. Post a picture of it on Instagram. See how much clout it gets you. Salt Bae’s dish costs around 1500GBP because people want to pay 1500 GBP to show off that they can afford to pay that much. It’s all about the flex.”

Get me off this planet.

conspicuous consumption is not even close to new.

phlegmatic take: hey, at least we’ve improved a little; the conspicuity is now primarily about location of where the meat is eaten, not whether or not you’re permitted to eat at all!

Turns out that space travel is one of the latest and greatest flexes you can make.

Presumably he meant without returning.

Second only to being effortlessly popular, happy, relaxed, content, and balanced, without even being rich!

If someone flexes alone in the forest is it really a flex?

Flex can be in the eyes of the beeholder.

If someone flexing to prop up themselves with BS, meets such a person they will be stung with the existential dread of 10,000 flexes!

> As of this writing, Midwit Milhouse's original tweet only has 3 likes and 9 quote retweets. A post making fun of Midwit Milhouse for posting something so weird has 121 retweets and almost 2,000 likes.

The planet is fine.

Nothing new about that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good

Also, if you feel particularly ready for a spaceflight, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich .

People really need to just go outside.

It's also hilarious that the right clickers are recreating the steak with gold for $90 instead of a plain steak for $20.

Yeah, gold literally doesn't have any flavor (it's inert so there's nothing for your taste buds to react to), so putting it on the steak is also "all about the flex".

According to the base article[1] the plain steak was about £33 or ~$45 not $20 which seems about right for a nicer cut of beef in the UK. Still a lot of extra money for the gold(£28). I do think you can get a few sheets of gold leaf for quite a bit for cheaper than that if you shop around though.

[1] https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/whats-on/food-drink-...

Weirdly, I feel like I entirely agree with that Twitter post, but take the exact opposite lesson from it.

So, this steak that they are imitating. It's not a good steak. As the tweet suggests, its sole purpose for existing is conspicous consumption.

You can't steal/copy/right-click that, and you shouldn't want to. Hopefully the person doing the at home imitation is at least in part trying to deflate and ridicule the whole idea.

The twitter post is right, if your goal is to impress strangers on the internet obsessed with fame/status instead of to eat a good steak.

I've never seen such an obvious target for reappropriation[1]. This will probably be reappropriated before it even has time to be commonly established as an insult.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reappropriation

By this stage it's almost like re-reappropriation.

According to the article, it already has.

> Midwit Milhouse said on Twitter.

Wait, is that a real name? Were his parents too afraid too name him "halfwit" and too honest to name him anything else?

Twitter doesn't have a real name policy like other social networks do.

It says a lot about human society that as soon as we manage to abolish scarcity for a particular class of goods, people who are forced to reckon with the concept of infinite abundance lose their minds and bend their whole will toward reintroducing scarcity by any means possible.

but no, not really? you could duplicate media since the days of the compact cassette, but we had several decades where people weren't losing their minds and creating music NFTs. The craze over scarcity for digital media was entirely a phenomena that appeared in the past few years.

How does DRM fit into this? Isn't that kind of an attempt to make digital media scarce? It's just that NFTs are using technology that wasn't available when Sony had to install rootkits to try to achieve something like the same thing.

No. DRM is literally the attempt to block right-clicking. NFTs don't try to block it.

>How does DRM fit into this? Isn't that kind of an attempt to make digital media scarce?

Not really? There's a song on itunes for $0.99. No matter how many copies you buy, there's still going to be the song available. They're definitely restricting access, but it's an entirely different dynamic from limited edition trading cards, or signed vinyl records. That's why an vintage record can fetch hundreds of dollars on the secondary market, but good luck selling that mp3 you got from itunes in the early 2000s.

Compact cassettes were not a lossless medium. The DAT cassette was fought against with tooth and nail. The CD was okay as a read only medium.

Look how long it took for the music industry to accept DRM free audio formats. Without Apple's dominance we probably wouldn't still have them now.

The web had from the beginning the problem of monetizing digital content that you just could right-click and download.

> Compact cassettes were not a lossless medium. The DAT cassette was fought against with tooth and nail. The CD was okay as a read only medium.

even if we accept that, that still means we had more than 3 decades of limitless duplication, yet people aren't "lose their minds and bend their whole will toward reintroducing scarcity by any means possible".

>Look how long it took for the music industry to accept DRM free audio formats. Without Apple's dominance we probably wouldn't still have them now.

1. DRM realistically wasn't an issue due to pirates (remember naptster?)

2. games have DRM that are sometimes unbroken for years. Yet nothing noticeable changes when the DRM is finally broken. there's also DRM-free games, that people aren't clamoring for scarcity over. therefore I doubt something being DRM protected or not has any effect on its scarcity value.

We didn't have 30 years of limitless duplication. You're overestimating how many people were online in the 90s.

Look at the graphs from this article: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/10/visualizing-40-years-...

I'm actually surprised that the music industry revenue went down that fast in the 2000s. I would have guessed it took a little bit longer. So going by those figures, we had 20 years of limitless duplication and it utterly destroyed the revenue of the music industry. Exactly what they feared would happen if there was ever a digital writable medium to play music from.

NFTs are not DRM. They produce scarcity in a different way than DRM does. They don't encrypt digital content, they sign it. Without additional support from websites or physical venues this doesn't do anything.

This could e.g. be something like a Twitter checkmark for a NFT profile or being allowed to a special club only if you own a certain kind of NFT.

>So going by those figures, we had 20 years of limitless duplication and it utterly destroyed the revenue of the music industry. Exactly what they feared would happen if there was ever a digital writable medium to play music from.

right, but that's more of a economics issue (ie. how content creation would be funded) than GP's claim of

"people who are forced to reckon with the concept of infinite abundance lose their minds and bend their whole will toward reintroducing scarcity by any means possible.".

>NFTs are not DRM. They produce scarcity in a different way than DRM does.

the NFT equivalent in ye olden days would be signed records/cds/posters. they have similar characteristics to NFTs (scarcity, bragging rights, etc.), but people aren't "losing their minds" over them. I haven't heard owners of signed records making fun of napster/itunes users for "right-clicker mentality" or whatever.

There was no way to reintroduce scarcity up until now. And now there's money involved. So people go crazy, although not necessarily those people or the industry that should benefit from it.

> I haven't heard owners of signed records making fun of napster/itunes users for "right-clicker mentality" or whatever.

There was no Twitter back then. :-)

But also, as far as I have witnessed it, it was the "right-clickers" that started it. "Hey, coiner, I downloaded your NFT with a simple right-click. How stupid are you to pay money for that?"

If the owners of signed records made fun of mp3 users, the mp3 users might have retaliated as well?

> 1. DRM realistically wasn't an issue due to pirates (remember naptster?)

IIRC, it did have a couple consequences like Apple embedding PII into music files..

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/06/should-apple-embed-you...

..or going even further back, the arrest of a hacker at a Defcon convention who broke the DRM from eBooks.

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/01/07/17/130226/fallout-from-...

I can't specifically recall but I think there was a time a Stanford (?) researcher published a paper on SDMI (?) watermarks in music files as well.

I think that's the most interesting take on the whole NFT phenomenon I've seen.

Is the whole thing a real-world manifestation of a large group of people's inability to subconsciously accept infinite abundance of digital goods?

I don't know if that's true, but it's interesting.

... There’s a thing called “conspicuous consumption”, and it’s apparently old as the hills (are there any pol sci people here who actually know this stuff and can tell me I got everything backwards?). That NFTs are indeed it is a good point and I appreciate the insight, but in view of the aforementioned hills the remaining commentary about modern first-world humans seems unfounded.

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/thorstein-veblen/the-theor...

Book that introduced the phrase.

I'm not sure it's conspicuous consumption. Cases of recent pure conspicuous consumption in the tech world, such as the "diamond app" (an iOS app that displays a diamond and costs couple thousand dollars) didn't really catch on that much. I think what's really driving NFTs is:

1. Speculation. People just see it as another asset class that can be blown up and sold to the greater fool.

2. Artists trying to monetize their digital work this way. Up until NFTs arrived, digital art had very little market value (due to ability to make indistinguishable copies of the original at zero cost). Some artists hope that the NFTs will be the vehicle which allows them to cash on their digital work.

3. Money laundering and similar usual suspects.

I think you're right that that is a related concept, but I don't think it makes this uninteresting, I think it is perhaps exactly why it's interesting. It is precisely that it isn't "conspicuous consumption"... it's conspicuous, but it isn't consumption. The NFT "owners" are bothered because they've engaged in this conspicuous consumption, but then aren't reaping the benefits they expected because the thing wasn't consumed. They consumed the thing, but what's this, so are other people! That's not part of the deal!

I think you've sharpened the interestingness, not removed it.

It's more like certified consumption. Unfortunately nobody but people drinking the NFT Kool Aid give a shit about the certification. That must be utterly frustrating.

I see it more as another instance of the rent-seeking instinct. There’s a ton of capital seeking reliable returns and most of the blockchain buzz has been based on the idea that people with lots of capital can buy in early so everyone else will be forced to pay them an ever-increasing premium just to be able to make transactions. NFTs are a way to generate the demand they’re counting on — scarcity is part of the sales pitch to keep buyers from asking whether they’re actually getting much for their money.

>most of the blockchain buzz has been based on the idea that people with lots of capital can buy in early so everyone else will be forced to pay them an ever-increasing premium just to be able to make transactions

So you think NFTs are a plot by people to drive up ETH gas fees?

I think there are a ton of people who see a huge amount of money piled into cryptocurrencies which have not seen much adoption and are trying to come up with things which could give normal people a need to start using it. NFTs are just part of the larger frenzy trying to be the one who finds a winning combination.

If you recall, that first big NFT sale was when a major Ethereum holder paid a lot of money for an NFT but not the rights to one of Beeple’s paintings. That lead to a ton of free advertising, and since this was all paper money based on a fraction of their total Ethereum holdings I’m sure they were expecting the cost to be outweighed by the increased demand for their remaining tokens.

Is there a readable summary of this NFT thing. I was only vaguely following it but assumed it was some way to support artists, kind of like rich people getting a hospital wing named after your family trust fund. Not great, as you don't want to rely on philanthropy of the super rich, but probably better than many of the alternatives.

But is the idea to generate a secondary market for this stuff and sell it on at higher prices?

The second option, unfortunately. Most people on art communities are pissed off at the whole NFT thing, it really doesn't help artists much. First, anyone can generate a NFT, so there's no guarantee that the artist is even involved with the token. Second, creating a NFT costs ethereum, so it's totally possible to spend money creating one that turns out to be worthless. Third, most of the 'art' associated with the valuable NFTs is procedurally generated crap, so it's fairly obvious that the buyers are mostly interested in speculation.

From article: > In this term we have a microcosm of the entire philosophical debate surrounding NFTs

we'll come up with any reason that lets us shoot the sht about it endlessly :)

NFT ownership is only exclusive within the community of people who take NFTs seriously. Kind of like one guy in an insane asylum claiming a particular chair. Maybe that's a big deal to other inmates, but none of them should mistake their environment for the real world where the claim doesn't matter.

The problem with the analogies used is that NFTs do not even confer ownership of the underlying art.

Still a firm believer that the NFTs are simply an instrument for money laundering and other criminal enterprises. Those transactions which aren’t simply provide cover (possibly unwittingly) for those that are.

For years economists debated the things that are now being worked out experimentally. And it turns out the economists were dead wrong about a lot of it, as this article demonstrates.

All my NFT owner homies don't even use mice any more. We have VR workstations now. You right-click to save images? I save entire 3D models.

/lazy-sarcasm

Emm, NFT-ownership is about NOT saving, but having BS exclusive rights to. So, to get the sarcasm right, the NFT-onwer shouldn't brag about how he "saves" (even if he saves something more "special" like 3D models over plain images).

In the context of the "right-click mentality joke" (and in reality probably) NFT-owners are anti-saving.

Are you ADHD or autistic at all?

It's Hacker News, not Normie news.

And judging from the question, you don't seem high on Emotional Intelligence yourself :)

As they used to (almost) say: NFTs want to be free!

There's utility in buying the steak at the restaurant though. Maybe not enough for most to buy it, but there is some utility in having someone else make a meal that you might screw up if you do it yourself.

There isn't a lot of utility in an NFT as compared to a normal JPEG except as a store of value, which nobody really wanted to use JPEGs for until this year.

> There's utility in buying the steak at the restaurant though.

Exactly. No one would pay $1500 for a bottle of vodka at a liquor store, but the same bottle in the VIP section of some celeb filled club is a different experience. (I still wouldn’t pay it, but I get the difference.)

I've got a variant of this disease called "Shift-F10" mentality so I don't have to move my hand to the mouse.

The 'right-clicker mentality' seems to be effectively another word for hacker culture, no?

Nah. It's another term for common sense. Nobody with common sense goes to the trouble of buying something that is easier to get for free.

It's notable how this attitude can only exist in a scenario where the art itself has no real-world value and the stakes don't matter. It's easy to dismiss "right-clickers" if you aren't losing any money from them. But anyone who owns digital media that _is_ valuable doesn't think like this at all.

For example, consider a musician losing their income because their fans are pirating their mp3s. The musician would never dismiss that by saying, "those right-clickers will never have the satisfaction that I do of owning the original copyright!" As we all know from the past twenty years, they take the exact opposite approach.

When you have something actually valuable, then owning it in a legal sense doesn't mean much if anyone can just copy it.

If everybody believes in Unicorns, and no one ever mentions that they don't exists, then we can all ride Unicorns around all day!

"Right clickers" are people who not only do not believe, but insist on ruining everyone else's ride by continuing not to believe. If only we could eliminate these Faithless ones, think of all the problems we could solve!

I've been saving images for much longer than you've been trading for magic beans, I assure you.

So the "right-clicker mentality" essentially means not being technically illiterate?

No, it means not being 'NFT literate' (to put it generously) or sceptical/not buying in (literally) to the idea of NFTs: 'I can just right-click and save the image, I don't need to pay for the NFT.'

It's the other side of the same coin, isn't it?

Well I don't think so, unless you're saying 'disagreeing with NFT value' is 'technically illiterate'?

I thought you were sort of remarking that NFT proponents are the ones not technically literate (paying for NFTs rather than being aware of right-click>save) so I just meant that no, it's being used the other way around, by the proponents, derogatorily about the people who would rather right-click>save an image than 'invest' in an NFT.

Perhaps you realise that, and I just misunderstood your comment.

> I thought you were sort of remarking that NFT proponents are the ones not technically literate (paying for NFTs rather than being aware of right-click>save)

Well yes.

Really, it's a complaint that you're not following the rules of the game they just made up and insist you have to play even though you never agreed to it.

Not really, it assumes we all know how to right click, but only the gauche would actually right click rather than buy an NFT (and presumably right click on the image brought up by the resulting URL ...).

It means you're ignorant, indifferent, or confrontational about the social aspects of "proof" of ownership over the pixels.

This is one of those fantastic clarifications that both sides can agree upon.

The idea that you can privatize a record of deeds is indeed an interesting idea. IMHO, the best counterargument isn't right clicking; it is creating another registrar with the same assets and different "owners".

The most useful NFT I've seen so far is Decentraland's LAND token, which behaves much like a deed to a plot of virtual land. Its something you could theoretically download free gratis, but as LAND is linked to a finite space in a living virtual world, you'll never own it in its entirety by just screenshoting it because your copy is desyncronised from the original.

A photograph, or even a 3D scan of the Eiffel tower does not mean you own it or infringe on the owner's or designer's perceived rights, and likewise a copy of the land isolated from the Decentraland grid does not mean you own the LAND.

Tl;dr, I think NFTs need to focus on being a record or something - anything! Rather than being the new way to buy art, sell the technology as the new way to do deeds, licences, certificates, etc.

You wouldn't download an NFT. /s

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